Grammar Lesson
by OzGeek
Summary: McGee gives Tony a lesson in grammar. Short oneshot. Thanks to LeoLass and Shellie Williams for the useful comments. Spoilers for Twisted Sister and beyond. Someone requested some more so I wrote another chapter. Now a twoshot. Upped the rating a little.
1. Chapter 1

Tony hunted down the last recalcitrant letter on his keyboard. That was it; finally his report was finished. He leaned back in his chair with a sigh of satisfaction only to find McGee peering intently over his shoulder.

"You might want to rephrase that bit there," his finger hovered over the text on the screen.

"Why?"

"You've used passive voice," said McGee simply.

Tony raised an eyebrow but McGee was staring at him expectantly as though he had just answered the question. He turned to appeal to Gibbs but found him smirking at his desk. Ziva, looking inordinately interested in proceedings, offered him no solace either.

"The problem with passive voice," McGee explained as though talking to someone actually interested in what he was saying, "is that it both weakens the force of the sentence and transfers the subject of the sentence to whatever the verb is acting on. So where you've said 'The bullet was lodged in the heart of the victim' you've made the bullet the subject and it's being acted on by 'lodged'."

Tony could not have looked more stunned if McGee had ripped off his own leg and eaten it in front of him. At least he knew who would fill the void when Ducky finally left.

"So," continued McGee unperturbed, leaning past Tony and typing authoritatively, "if we make this: 'The bullet lodged in the victim's heart', then the bullet is actually doing the acting."

He stood back and admired his work. "See how much better that flows?"

The look on Tony's face told him that he didn't.

"Look," McGee tried again, "There's a little mnemonic," he paused, "a little memory prompt", he re-phrased, "about passive voice called the 'Passive Voice Carol'. It's sung to the tune of 'Oh Christmas Tree':

_Oh passive voice, oh passive voice,_

_The verb's object's the subject._

_Avoid all 'seems', likewise 'of the',_

_Don't use 'as though' or 'found to be',_

_And 'that' and 'was' are bad because,_

_They'll lead you into trouble._

See, you've used 'of the'."

Tony wondered lightly if McGee could feel the ice thinning beneath him. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Gibbs smothering a laugh. Directly in front of him, Ziva threw her head down and pretended to be intensely interested in something on her desk.

"Oh," McGee continued helpfully, scanning over the document, "and there's an apostrophe between the 'there' and the's'; 'there's' is a contraction of 'there' and 'is'."

"My words are having contractions now? What, I inserted a pregnant pause 9 months ago? What exactly is the gestation period of a word, McGeek?"

"No, no, a contraction of the words like a concatenation of 'there' and 'is'," McGee clarified cheerfully.

Across the room, Gibbs and Ziva heard the last straw gently touch down atop the camel's load.

Tony inflated from his seat, the volume of his voice directly proportional to his height above the chair. "Well how's this for not using passive voice. I'm sure swashbuckling, socially repugnant Special Agent Tommy and Lisa, the sultry and emotionally distant Mossad officer write grammatically perfect reports but here in the real world we just write the facts. You are starting to really get on my nerves, McGeek."

"And you," said McGee smugly, "have just spilt an infinitive."


	2. Chapter 2 : Enter the Ducky

"I couldn't help overhearing, Timothy." Ducky was standing at the elevator. "And young Anthony might be gratified to learn that passive voice is often considered acceptable in reports, especially those of the scientific persuasion. It is not, however, so common in fictional literature of the type you indulge."

"True, Ducky," McGee conceded as Tony sank back into his chair, happy to be relegated to the role of spectator rather than participant. "But the softening of the emphasis argument still holds."

Ducky swooped into the thick of the action. "But I do agree with you on the split infinitives: 'If you need a 'to', you've got to stay two'. Mind you, split infinitives have appeared in a number of the classics."

"Like 'to boldly go'," McGee agreed cheerfully.

Ducky eyed him in disgust. "Classics, Timothy," he reiterated. "The poet John Donne used them occasionally, and even Shakespeare is known to have used one: '_Thy pity may deserve **to pitied be**_' but it was a sonnet so he was restrained by the necessities of rhyme and rhythm. As far as I know, he never repeated the offense."

"I don't think Tony's really up to worrying about split infinitives yet, Ducky," McGee pointed out returning to the document on the screen. "For example, it should be 'fewer forensic tests were done' not 'less forensic tests were done'; the numbers are fewer but the tests are not lesser. Just ask Abby."

Horrified, Tony suddenly realised Abby might be one of 'them'.

Ducky leaned over to read Tony's report for himself. "Oh this is a plethora of grammatical errors," he congratulated him. " 'Its' for example: 'Its' is a possessive pronoun, like 'his'. You don't use the apostrophe unless it can be read as 'it is' or 'it has'."

"A contraction," McGee reminded Tony, helpfully. "And strictly speaking 'data' is the plural of 'datum' so it needs to be used with a plural verb but that's sort of going out of style nowadays."

"More's the pity," Ducky commiserated with its fate. "Do you ever read these things out aloud, Anthony?"

Tony blinked, "who to?"

"To whom," McGee and Ducky chorused.

Tony closed his eyes in frustration. When did these people start multiplying at his desk?

"Ducky's right," McGee continued, "it's absolutely the best way to pick up grammatical errors and changes in tense."

"Isn't that why we have grammar checkers and spell checkers?"

"Oh you'd be surprised what they miss." McGee smiled in reminiscence, "I once had an 'uneasy clam' descend on someone, and 'shifty eyes', sounded a lot more gross when I skipped the 'f' and double typed the 't'."

"That gives 'brown eyes' a whole new meaning," Ducky noted. "I have a lot of trouble with the nickname 'Ducky': on the standard QWERTY keyboard, 'F' and 'D' are adjacent keys. I can't tell you how many times I've signed something completely inappropriate on social correspondences that the spell checker didn't pick up; never had any offers, mind you."

"Besides," added McGee, "sometimes the spell checker simply can't guess what word you're trying to spell and it gives you the wrong word entirely."

"Yeah, like 'diarrhoea'," Tony volunteered, "my spell checker can't even begin to guess the spelling of that!"

The room went silent.

"And how often, exactly, do you need to put 'diarrhoea' into your reports?" Ducky inquired politely.

"Usually they're full of it," Gibbs muttered absently to himself, flicking through a pile of similarly endowed reports on his desk.

"Oh, I don't," Tony assured him, "but it's great for sick days. You can stay off as long as you like and no one questions it. If you say you've got a cold, people expect you to be sniffling for a few days. I can't remember to keep that up. It's not as if people come up to you and say: 'so how's the diarrhoea going?' "

His eyes came to rest on Gibbs who was listening with great interest. "Not that I'd ever do that here, boss. Those were all real cases."

"Is there a pneumatic for remembering the spelling of diarrhoea?" Ziva asked.

"Mnemonic," McGee corrected her, automatically.

"Actually, 'pneumatic' could be quiet appropriate here," Ducky considered, "it does mean 'powered by pressurized gas'."

McGee and Ducky enjoyed a communal laugh as the others looked on nonplussed.

"OK," Tony rose indignantly from his chair, "Why don't I leave the report to you guys and you can get back to me."

Tony should have known better. His intention was to guilt the grammar twins into leaving him in peace but he knew something wasn't going to plan when he felt McGee pushing him bodily from his chair.

He wondered off in frustration throwing a: "let me know when you're done," over his shoulder.

Half an hour later, Tony found a beautifully bound document lying in the middle of his desk. He dropped it neatly in Gibbs' hands, reflecting it would be the first time in living memory that Gibbs didn't hand him back a report with a list of changes within 10 minutes of receiving it.

Two steps on the return journey, he heard the tell tale, "Hey, DiNozzo, fix this."

He turned to see Gibbs handing him back the report.

"What? What could you have possibly picked up that the world's two greatest pedants failed to see?"

Gibbs gave him a smug smile, "You forgot the date."


End file.
